“Next time he asks you what you like, tell him that you’ll like whatever he likes,” she said.
“How sick!” I cried. “I’m not going to tell him that. He’ll think I don’t have a mind of my own.”
“Yes, yes, you have such a great mind,” Nalla-ma rumbled. “That’s why you can’t get a man to ask you to marry him.”
Nalla-ma was worried and annoyed that our conversation was taking so long to resolve itself into a conclusion. One day when Ram called she picked up the phone. After the usual inquiries about his health, the weather, and his job, she suddenly said—in the formal tone she reserved for sons-in-law—“Of course your good self is very intelligent and I don’t have to tell you anything. But isn’t it time that we heard some good news?”
I was horrified. I tried to grab the receiver from her hands, but she dodged me with surprising nimbleness. She listened some more and then handed me the phone with a smug smile. I glared at her.
“Sorry,” I muttered, thoroughly embarrassed. “You know how grand-mothers are.”
Ram and I had become extremely comfortable with each other. He told me that the elders in his family were equally eager to hear some “good news.” We joked about the forty-eight-hour rule. “My aunt thought she was being very generous,” Ram said. “She told me that I could make a decision within forty-eight hours.”
One day, after our usual chitchat about the heat in Madras, winter in the Northeast, Christmas shopping, and Bill Clinton’s election, Ram asked me to marry him.
I had thought about this moment in great detail and had even come up with what I considered a clever response. “Why don’t you come and ask me in person?” I replied.
“Answer me now and I’ll come,” he said.
I paused. He had pushed me to a corner.
“In that case, yes,” I replied, without qualifying what “in that case” was.
Although I had said “Yes,” in my mind, I felt like I hadn’t completely accepted his proposal. I had only said “Yes” so that he would come and ask me in person. I had an out.
A FEW MINUTES LATER the phone rang. It was my mother.
“Congratulations!” Mom sounded jubilant. “Ram told me that he proposed to you.”
“But I haven’t said yes,” I said quickly.
“He mentioned that too,” my mom said. “But don’t worry, I told him that you accepted.”
“What?” I shouted.
She continued blithely, “I told Ram that you had trouble making up your mind but that you liked him a lot.”
Nalla-ma, on the other hand, was firmly convinced that it was her nudging that had prompted Ram to propose. The two most important women in my life had bamboozled me into marriage, and try as I might, I couldn’t come up with a single reason to resist.
Everyone was overjoyed. Ram’s sister called me from Florida to congratulate me and welcome me into their family. My parents sent a telex message to Shyam, asking him to disembark from his ship. The wedding was set for April 15, and my parents hired a marriage contractor (similar to a marriage coordinator). They spent long hours closeted in the study, discussing invitations, menus, bands, banquet halls, and saris.
OUR ENGAGEMENT CEREMONY—where the priest announced the wedding date and my parents exchanged gifts with Ram’s—was held at Ram’s house, and he flew down for the occasion.
The ceremony itself was merely a preamble to the main event, which was a sumptuous tiffin buffet, served on the terrace for one hundred guests. As the bride-to-be I was the object of great curiosity and was stopped with friendly questions on my way to the buffet line. Thankfully, Ram’s cousin Nalini took my arm, cut in, and filled a plate with hot bondas, samosas, and sweet, square coconut burfis.
As I sat down, plate in hand, Nalla-ma hissed, “A new bride does not stuff herself with bondas. Don’t eat a thing on your plate.”
I defiantly ignored her glares and proceeded to eat every delicious morsel, fending off solicitous offers for seconds with a practiced wave of the hand.
My parents took the engagement tiffin buffet as a challenge. Not to be outdone, they let it be known that they were planning a nine-course afternoon tiffin for our wedding with three kinds of sweet dishes, four kinds of savories, coffee, and ice cream, all of which would be served on a traditional banana leaf at 4:00 P.M. sharp on our wedding day.
“The Wedding Tiffin” took on a stature greater than the wedding itself. Cousins came from Nairobi and New York to sample it. Relatives I had never heard of called my parents before the wedding to provide their proper address, “just in case” my parents wanted to invite them. College buddies asked about the tiffin menu instead of my trousseau. My parents locked themselves into an air-conditioned bedroom and conferred with the caterers about the minutiae of tiffin preparation. The result was an afternoon tiffin that people talked about long after the wedding itself was forgotten.
Glistening banana leaves were laid out on long banquet tables. At four o’clock, as row upon row of guests sat waiting, the kitchen doors opened and uniformed waiters came out in choreographed precision. From large stainless steel buckets they served sweet carrot halwa, orange-gold sojji sprinkled with saffron, and almond payasam in silver bowls. Complementing the sweets were the savories. Hot vadas served with spicy coconut chutney and onion sambar; fluffy white idlis; golden plantain bajjis; and a dollop of upma served with an ice cream scoop. The menu wasn’t particularly novel or unusual, which was perhaps why our guests loved it. Sometimes, predictability and tradition please expectant guests rather than erratic invention and experiments that could fail.
ALL INDIAN WEDDINGS HAVE several things in common: noise, food, music, and color. This is why Indians who live in America or any other part of the world go back home to get married. It would be hard to duplicate the color and happy chaos that surrounds an Indian wedding anywhere else in the world. Aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins, relatives, and friends descend by the dozen. They take India’s unpredictability and counter it with their exuberance. When there are power cuts, they light hurricane lanterns; when it rains, they dance in the rain; when the loudspeakers fail, they sing in chorus. Guests throw flowers at the bridal couple; hosts spray the guests with perfumed rose water.
The bride and groom walk around the fire seven times; they sit in the mandapam (bridal tent) cocooned by flowers, smoke, clamoring relatives, and chanting priests. They hold hands and touch the feet of elders to get their blessings; they sprinkle turmeric and wear vermilion sindoor on their foreheads. The parents hide behind pillars and wipe away tears as they worry about the in-laws, caterers, flowers, and foibles.
Women sashay around in silk saris of vivid hues—parrot green, brinjal-blossom purple, onion-skin pink, Lord Rama blue—even the names of the colors are evocative. They bring out diamond and gold jewelry from their safe-deposit boxes and don them in dazzling combinations. Someone loses a necklace, sending everyone into a frenzy before it is found under a pile of garlands or in some other innocuous place. An aged relative drinks eucalyptus oil by mistake and has to be taken to the emergency room. Children run around unchecked by elders; they make up games and hide under eaves. They stay up late and cling to the bride; they frustrate photographers by crossing their eyes at the last minute. At some middle-class weddings the street in front of the wedding hall is usurped and rows of chairs are arranged across the street to accommodate the swelling number of guests, forcing traffic to make a detour along other streets. Everyone sways to the pulsating music that never seems to cease; they indulge in a pageantry for the senses that would be deemed over-the-top and out of control anywhere else in the world. Above all, they eat and drink.
My wedding was no different. An Indian wedding is a two- or three-day affair, by the end of which everyone is exhausted. The first day involves the purification rites prior to the actual wedding and includes close family members. People are able to check out what the others are wearing, to gossip and gripe about imagined slights before being submerged in the fest
ivities and tension of the ceremony on the last day.
On the second day, the day of my wedding, I woke up at 3:00 A.M. The astrologer had deemed 7:30 A.M. to be the most auspicious moment of the day, which meant that I had to be ready in bridal garb by five-thirty, for there were two hours of rituals before the actual wedding ceremony. In decades past, when men and women didn’t even see each other before their wedding day, these two hours of rituals were a way of helping them ease into each other. In these modern days, Ram and I used the two hours to hold hands, complain about the heat and smoke, and entreat everyone who passed by to bring us glasses of panagam, a juice with jaggery and ginger that is consumed by the gallon at South Indian weddings.
Right after Ram tied the thali—a thread symbolizing our union (similar to the ring in Christian weddings) and declaring us officially married—around my neck, there was a mass exodus to the dining room. We watched mournfully from the dais as entire congregations of people rose and exited en masse. By the time we finished yet another hour of rituals, we were almost faint with hunger. By then, most of the guests had eaten and left, to freshen up for the evening’s reception. Only close family members, which in our case included cousins, aunts, uncles, oh, about 150 people in all, waited for us.
It was only 10:00 A.M., but the kitchen was already serving lunch. We sat in a row at the long tables, which had been set with banana leaves. Eating from banana leaves requires the expertise of a civil engineer. The leaf has no rim and therefore no catchment area for fluids such as rasam or payasam, which therefore flow through the entire leaf and down the table unchecked. Adding to the challenge is the fact that waiters at weddings rush through the line, ladling and pouring hurriedly and insouciantly, without waiting to see if the eater is ready to receive it. After getting rasam dripping down the front of my dress when I was a child, I quickly learned the process.
The trick to eating at South Indian weddings is to keep an eye out for waiters as they start out from the kitchen, and notice what they are bringing. If they are bringing seconds of a curry that you like, you had better finish what’s left on your banana leaf even though you might be in the midst of some other dish. Only then will the waiters give you seconds. Similarly, when you see waiters bringing out the rasam, you need to quickly build a circular dam with the rice to catch the rasam in the middle. Otherwise it will run in streams all over and out of the banana leaf. The payasam is trickier because it is a meal in itself and doesn’t require rice. The only way to eat payasam off a banana leaf is to quickly scoop it up with bare hands and slurp it down, as many old-timers do. Your hand has to be trained to serve as spoon, fork, knife, and scoop, all in one.
When Ram and I had our first lunch as husband and wife, some of his cousins ganged up and demanded that I feed my husband.
“Come on, feed him, feed him,” they chanted.
I was in a quandary. I had no intention of taking some runny rasam rice in my hands and dripping it all over his face. I looked at my banana leaf with its assortment of food, all of which suddenly looked dangerous. Suddenly I had an idea. I lifted the tumbler containing some cool panagam and set it to his lips. It was the first thing I fed my new husband.
OUR WEDDING RECEPTION was held on the lawns of the Woodlands Hotel in Madras that evening. Located on Edward Eliot’s Road, equidistant from the Madras Music Academy and Marina Beach, Woodlands was the bastion of Southern tradition, advertising itself proudly as serving “pure vegetarian cuisine.”
At two in the afternoon I woke up from a siesta and sat in the hotel suite, surrounded by six women who were getting me ready for the evening reception. Two Chinese beauticians, known simply as Helen and Sui, were puffing and combing my hair into an elaborate coiffure. Four girls had taken possession of my hands and legs and were touching up the intricate maroon henna designs that they had drawn a few days earlier.
Three hours of beautifying later, bedecked and bejeweled, our two families converged on the lawns. The sprinklers were on, and the leaping droplets of water made a million rainbows as they caught the long rays of a magnificent magenta sunset. Born of the Bay of Bengal, a salty breeze lifted steamy sighs from the moist earth, mixed them with the smell of basmati rice, nutmeg, and fennel from the hotel’s kitchens, and swept them into the twinkling colored lights on the swaying ashoka trees.
Car after car pulled up, depositing men in summer safari suits and women in silk saris that matched the impetuous streaks of orange, purple, and vermilion that were flung across the cerulean sky. My parents and in-laws stood at the arched entrance, greeting the guests. There was a flurry of activity as the governor appeared—he was a friend of my father-in-law’s—surrounded by uniformed bodyguards, paparazzi, and flashing lightbulbs.
I was dressed in a burgundy silk sari, and Ram was wearing a dark blue suit. Behind us was an elaborate mosaic of flowers with the words SHOBA WEDS RAM spelled out in yellow daffodils, pink balsams, and green basil.
We were married.
PANAGAM
There was an asura—a really bad man—who made an impossible wish. He didn’t want to be killed by man or beast, not inside or outside, not during the day or night, not with a weapon. As children, we were told the tale of this asura along with the whodunit: how did Lord Vishnu kill him? Well, he took an avatar as Narasimha, in which he combined a lion’s face with a man’s body. Then he carried the asura to the threshold of his palace. At twilight he ripped open the asura with his nails and killed the evil man. This god was called Nara-simha (man-lion), and panagam was his favorite beverage. There is a temple near Vijaywada, in Andhra State, where the presiding deity is called Panaga Narasimha.
Panagam is usually made during Sri Rama Navami, a Hindu festival celebrating the birth of Lord Rama, hero of the epic Ramayana. It aids digestion, and it was continuously consumed during my wedding.
SERVES 4
2 tablespoons jaggery
1 teaspoon ground ginger
Pinch cardamom powder
1 teaspoon lime juice (optional)
Mix the ingredients in 2 cups of cold water and serve.
SEVENTEEN
Honeymoon in America
AS A NEW BRIDE, one of the first things I received from my mother was an anjala potti. Shaped like a biscuit tin, this stainless steel container had six compartments filled with black mustard seeds, urad dal, cumin, coriander seeds, fenugreek, and channa dal. With these spices I could cook any South Indian dish I wanted. At least in theory.
My idea of a perfect meal included a bottle of a summery chardonnay with some spicy blue corn nachos and salsa to start off; a crisp, garlicky bruschetta topped with vine-ripened tomatoes and red onions as an appetizer; some Turkish tzaziki to clear the palate; a fiery vegetarian pad thai with lemongrass, galangal, spicy peanut sauce, and kefir lime for the main course; and for dessert a tiramisu and cappuccino.
There was just one problem. Ram loved Indian food and had a discerning palate that could detect the slightest mistake I made. When we were first married, he put up with all my culinary experiments, even though he didn’t particularly care for nouvelle cuisine. We lived in Connecticut at that time. Ram worked for a consulting firm and I stayed at home, since I didn’t have a work permit. While waiting for my green card to be processed, I took to cooking. My type of cooking, that is. For a while we became macrobiotics, until Ram complained that he had no desire to live with the seasons if it meant eating turnips and kale every night for dinner. I became a vegan for a while. I experimented with world cuisine. I found that stir-frying potato pierogis in mustard oil with some sesame seeds and cilantro created a Polish-Chinese dish that unfortunately didn’t taste as nice as it sounded. I layered Indian vermicelli with some Stilton cheese, covered the whole thing with tangy pizza sauce, and baked it like a lasagne. I went too far when I mixed fava beans, buttermilk, garlic, ginger, and tofu into a curried concoction that I stuffed into pita bread and served by candlelight. It tasted awful. The pungent garlic and the fermented tofu had somehow intensified each
other’s flavors, making the sticky, yellow mass a morass of taste.
Ram complained bitterly and went on a hunger strike. “I want Indian food,” he said. “Could you make that, please? I’m tired of entertaining the United Nations in our kitchen.”
Ram’s idea of good food was very simple. He preferred Indian dishes made according to the recipe. “Why are you experimenting with recipes that have already been perfected through five thousand years of trial and error?” he would ask.
ONE EVENING I returned from an errand to find Ram already home. As I hurried into the kitchen to heat up our dinner, Ram said, “Wait a minute. I have a surprise for you.”
He reached into the refrigerator and took out a cake. At least, it looked like a cake. It was a white, circular blob with cherries on top. As I walked closer, I recognized it as the spaghetti I had made earlier. The white strands had congealed into a tight lump and taken on the shape of the circular cake container they had been left in. Ram had simply turned the whole thing upside down and placed some cherries on top. He stood with a teasing grin, triumphantly holding aloft his white “cake.”
“Want to eat out?” he asked.
AFTER THAT, I took pains to make traditional Indian recipes. Even though my inclination was to add a pinch of paprika here, a touch of lemongrass there, and a hint of miso, I ceased. I knew that Ram’s ever-vigilant palate would be alert to my experimenting.
“The rasam tastes funny today,” he would say after taking a sip.
“Oh, really?” I would ask innocently, rapidly calculating whether I had hidden the bottle of Japanese umeboshi paste within the innards of my pantry. After all, I had only added half a teaspoon.
Over several months I found that it didn’t matter whether it was a pinch of wasabi or a spritz of soy sauce over my Indian curries. Ram could always tell.
Monsoon Diary Page 19